creative consultant, business storyteller, writer

Last week The Financial Times asked the question, “Should CEOs tweet?” They reported that of the world's 224 biggest listed companies, only 32 have a CEO on Twitter and only 20 of those accounts are active.

In my mind, the question “Should CEOs Tweet?” is a bit like asking whether a CEO should use email or be on the telephone. Can you afford to ignore it?

Here’s the thing: in a world of similar looking businesses providing similar products and services, it’s your opinion and your ideas that will make you stand out from the crowd. Twitter gives you the CEO - and your business - a microphone, to tell your side of the story, to share your opinion and expertise with the outside world, to communicate with the audiences that matter to you.

So if you choose not to be on Twitter, I think you’re missing out.

But just because it’s easy to send a tweet, don’t be fooled that it’s easy to use Twitter as a business tool. Just because you can share a message with the world in a few seconds from the back of a cab, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think before you tweet (after all, you don’t want to end up like Rupert Murdoch).

Here are my five suggestions to improve your game on Twitter:

Remember that Twitter is a two-way street. It’s not a one-way channel to broadcast press releases - you need to engage with your audience. Invite debate, ask for feedback, perhaps even schedule a regular Q&A.

Live within the constraints of the platform. Learn to master brevity, get your message across in a single tweet rather a message that runs to multiple tweets. Similarly, if you only use Twitter to link to other communications - blog posts and news releases - and don’t use your 140 characters to actually say anything, you’re missing the point.

Know your audiences.Your audience might include customers, employees, press and investors. When you hit send, remember everyone will see it. So your tweets need to be relevant and gettable to everyone who follows you.

Let your personality in.Bland tweets full of corporate-speak aren’t going to build an audience. Be human: sprinkle the ‘real you’ throughout your tweets so your audience gets a sense of who you really are.

Don’t be a fence sitter: express an opinion. Twitter can be a great platform for thought leadership, so share your opinion. Tell us what you think and what’s getting you fired up, good and bad.

Ian Sanders helps organisations better nail & communicate what they do, including how they use Twitter. You can follow Ian on Twitter @iansanders

Last year I started a side project with Michal Dzierza which we’ve called ‘Curiosity & Opportunity’. In this video series we talk to founders, entrepreneurs and creatives about the balance between curiosity and opportunity in their work lives.

Here is the second in the series. I talk to Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, the inventor of Sugru (Irish for 'play'), a self-curing substance similar to silicone, which has thousands of uses (and users). Here she tells us the story behind Sugru and how curiosity plays a key role in her business life.

Last week I was in Davos, Switzerland at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum. I was working with the WEF Digital Media Team, creating content for their blog, Agenda.

Agenda is read by nearly one million people around the world each month and has been established as a platform where contributors can share their opinion and ideas on a range of global issues from entrepreneurship to the fight against global poverty. Contributors include heads of states, CEOs, the heads of International Organisations alongside young leaders, entrepreneurs and scientists.

Inspired by Todd Sattersten’s #YearInReview, a few years ago I started the annual ritual of posting ‘what I’ve shipped’. This is more than a brag-blog, it’s an exercise in standing back and looking at the work I’ve produced, the content I created, the projects I made happen.

Looking back on my year also helps me reflect on the different ingredients in my work life and what the dominant themes have been.

This year I’ve continued to be prolific in creating content for clients and for publications. In January I set myself a goal of creating 100 pieces of written content this year; I’m up to 97 so I’m nearly there.

So here’s what I shipped:

Telling stories for publications: This year I’ve continued to write for The Financial Times and British Airways Business Life magazine, and I’ve also added some new outlets: Ireland’s Sunday Independent and Cool Hunting. I’ve also contributed interviews for Monocle’s ‘The Entrepreneurs’ show (here’s a link to my online portfolio).

Helping clients capture their ideas, culture, stories: I’ve worked with a range of clients from an innovation agency to an energy trading business, capturing their thinking in articles, op-eds and other content. I’ve also been working with a law firm helping them explore and tell their story.

Helping clients grow: I’ve advised clients from a young digital agency to a content business on growth and development opportunities. I’ve also helped my energy trading client transform their marketing communications.

Workshops & talks: In February I co-hosted an evening of talks in my local community, in March I spoke to an audience of Dentsu Aegis execs, in July I hosted a meet-up on my local beach and earlier this month I hosted a Street Wisdom event .

Side Projects: I co-created and edited Trawler, a publication that will launch next year via a crowdfunding platform (it’s *nearly* shipped!) and I also co-created a video series Curiosity & Opportunity.

This marks my fifteen year anniversary of being self-employed. It’s been quite an adventure; when I started out in 2000, I could never have anticipated the shape and direction it's taken. When I look back on the last fifteen years the biggest change - and opportunity - has been in the role ‘Digital’ plays: in my own daily working practices; in how I develop and maintain relationships; and also in developing a new area of expertise, where I advise clients around digital communications.

Thanks to everybody I've met and worked with this year. Thanks for reading my blog. Here’s to the next adventure!

With the growing pressure from competitors online, some independent retailers are surviving by focusing on a distinctive ‘bricks & mortar’ experience, striving to offer something you just can’t get online.

At the heart of this approach is the retailer as editor; where in contrast to a cookie-cutter approach of the big stores, small independent retailers can offer a carefully curated selection of products.

That’s Alex Smith’s story. Having spent a career working for big retailers like Harvey Nichols and Selfridges, last year Alex founded Ideas On Paper, a small shop in Nottingham’s emerging creative quarter. Its products are linked by the theme of paper: magazines, journals, books and stationery.

It’s a small shop so Alex has to think carefully about what to stock, about what products to include in his edit, what to exclude (for example, Monocle magazine and School Of Life stationery are in, poorly produced magazines are out). In that sense, I think of Alex as an editor.

When we’re looking for answers in our working lives, we might pick up a book, go online or ask a friend. We probably don’t tend to look in the street for answers.

That however, is what Street Wisdom’s designed for, a three hour walking-workshop to find inspiration in the everyday environment around us. Having been on a couple of Street Wisdoms facilitated by its founders Chris and David, I decided to organise my own, inviting Lucy Taylor to join me as co-host.

So this is how I came to spend last Friday afternoon standing outside Leigh-on-Sea library, giving instructions to a group of people to walk around the town looking for patterns, seeing what they were drawn to, slowing right down.

I’d chosen the library since traditionally it’s a place people go to find answers. Instead our group headed outside, searching local alleyways, dead ends and shopping streets for their inspiration. They each went off with a question to ask, such as, what direction to take their business in 2015; how to find new clients; how to incorporate the local community into what they do.

Having experienced Street Wisdom events in Soho and in Shoreditch, this experience in Leigh-on-sea felt different. Here, in a coastal town where the river Thames meets the sea, the attendees were much more familiar with the local streets than they would be in a big city.

Admittedly a cold Friday afternoon in December wasn’t the perfect weather for walking around slowly, so two hours after we started, against the backdrop of a stunning estuary sunset, we gathered in the warmth of the Peter Boat pub in Leigh-on-Sea’s Old Town. Over mulled wine and coffee the attendees shared their feedback. They told us that even though they knew Leigh well, today they had managed to walk in unfamiliar streets, they saw noticeboards, shops and businesses they had never previously. ‘It’s there but we don’t see it,’ said one.

One of the group had been brave enough to ask strangers for help with his question, and got great insight from talking to a homeless man. Several fed back that they had found value not so much in finding answers, but through the exploration, in the process of Street Wisdom itself that unlocked something new.

Friday’s Street Wisdom gave people the opportunity to try something new, to be curious, to slow down in a town they thought they knew so well. As one person told me, ‘it gave me permission to stop, think and dawdle.’

I think of Street Wisdom as a live experiment, a process to reset your mind and rethink your approach to everything from creativity to problem solving. As Matt told me, as someone who walks around town at high speed, focused on where he’s headed, just the act of walking slowly was a new way of looking at the world.

Ten words that are asked of children around the world by teachers, parents, aunts, uncles and strangers at bus stops.

We tend to expect single rather than plural answers to that question. But the reality is many of us have chosen - or ended up, either intentionally or by accident - to carve out roles where we bring breadth of experiences rather than specialist, singular depth.

That’s my story. But I’d be lying if I said I did it consciously. I started my full-time career with a job in television production. When the TV series I was working on ended, I jumped sideways to an event promotion company, working on a music festival. When that was over I went to a small media company where in seven years I worked across every discipline in the building: radio production, live events, outside broadcasts, marketing projects.

All I was doing was following my curiosity and the opportunities that appeared before me.

But it shaped my career. By the end of my twenties I’d got a reputation as a generalist rather than a specialist. I was a do-er, making creative ideas happen no-matter-what, a safe pair of hands. The people I worked alongside were specialists: radio producers, broadcast engineers, video editors. They had deep career-long skills. They did one thing well.

My one thing? I was good at projects. Whatever the discipline, I took the same approach. Every project is the same: it has a start, a middle and an end. It has a client and a brief. A budget, a deadline. I was the bloke who made all these projects happen.

Today whilst I have deep experience as a writer, that’s combined with breadth across different disciplines (even as a writer, I work for publications and also for corporate clients). I like to cross borders, helping to solve problems by bringing experiences from one discipline to another.

IDEO’s Tim Brown talks about this in ‘The Career Choice Nobody Tells You About.’ “Rather than diving deep into the single discipline of industrial design, I accidentally discovered the joys of working across disciplines,” he says. Like mine, Tim’s career trajectory was an accident but he urges that choosing to go wide versus deep should be made consciously, not accidentally.

As a father that’s what I’m going to urge my kids: not only to build work lives on who they are and what they stand for; but also to consider that choice - breadth or depth? (I’m not arguing one is more important than the other; of course we need both).

But in a world of increasing uncertainty where roles we did ten years ago just won’t exist any more, there’s some benefit in being a border-crosser, able to switch between disciplines, able to add new strings to your bow, able to re-invent.

Choosing breadth means I never get bored of my work, it also means I never know what’s coming next.

Some people's careers and businesses are driven by a curiosity to try out new things. Others follow the opportunities that are presented to them. My own life in self-employment has been crafted out of a combination of the two. My gig at the Financial Times was borne out of my curiosity; my two year assignment working with Benetton came about from spotting a commercial opportunity, which I then turned into a big project.

I'm fascinated by the stories behind people’s work lives and that balance between curiosity and opportunity. I also love to use video to tell such stories.

Throw those two things together and you get my latest side project - ‘Curiosity & Opportunity’, a collaboration with Michal Dzierza.

In this series we’ll talk to a bunch of interesting people from creators to entrepreneurs and ask them what has guided them: curiosity or opportunity? In our first episode, we hear from designer/firestarter James Victore about how he’s never followed the dollar and what curiosity means to him.

In last week’s Financial Times, Michael Skapinker bemoans the fact that standards have fallen in business communications (‘Corporate writing stinks and the CEO is to blame’). Skapinker worries that today too many people — from legal to comms — get involved in crafting corporate statements, resulting in a car-crash of style and a loss of clarity:

“It is time for chief executives to write for themselves, or hire one decent writer, and tell it straight. It might not hurt as much as they think.”

He’s right. But poor writing is not confined to corporate announcements.

Today every business leader has the opportunity to share their opinion and expertise online. That’s the good news. But knowing where the ‘publish’ button is doesn't automatically make you a good writer. The challenge is not only in having something valuable to say, but to make sure it’s said clearly and simply.

So here’s a quick guide to help improve a blog post or think piece:

Keep it short. Brevity rules, so be ruthless in your edit. Short pieces have more impact.

Edit by reading out loud. If you’re struggling with the editing process, reading aloud is a sure fire way of making every word count.

Have an opinion. No-one’s interested in a fence-sitter, let’s hear what you think. Champion an idea, bust a myth, show your passion.

You only need one extra pair of eyes. Don’t write or edit by committee.Sending your draft to six colleagues will get you six different views. Instead just get one person to look over it before going live.

Focus on your audience. Don’t include industry jargon and confusing acronyms if your audience won’t understand them. Make it gettable.

One subject per post. Thought pieces should be single-minded — on one theme or one opinion.

Done is better than perfect. If you‘re responding to something that’s time critical, make sure your post is good enough and then get it out there. If you wait a week to make it perfect, you’ll have missed the boat.

If in doubt, hire a writer. A writer such as myself can help business leaders shape, capture and express their ideas, transforming abstract thinking into something concrete. (Click here to find out more and get in touch).

You don’t need to go far to find inspiration. Start by noticing what you like or don’t like about everyday experiences. Here are three examples - of likes and a dislike - that came from a single lunch break in Shoreditch last week:

1) Clear and simple(Dishoom restaurant). I kicked off my lunch break at Dishoom and asked for the gluten-free menu. Restaurants have different approaches to displaying what’s gluten-free. For me, Dishoom’s approach wins. They’ve produced a copy of the menu where the GF dishes are annotated with a green highlighter. They didn’t over-complicate it - it’s clear and simple, easy to use.

2) Applying the ‘who? & what?’ rule(Rough Trade). How can you filter complex information into easily readable content? After lunch at Dishoom I popped into Rough Trade East. In their monthly guide ‘Albums of the month’ they introduce customers to new music via simple three paragraph approach: i) Who - who is the band and where are they from?; ii) What - what is the album like?; iii) With - which mix of artists does it sound like? It’s a great structure to tell a story.

3) Build your website around your customer (Celia lager). After Rough Trade I picked up a bottle of gluten-free lager in a health food store on Commercial Street. It was a brand I hadn’t heard of, so I checked them out online. When I landed on the site I was met with a barrier - a pop-up asking me for my data to be kept in touch with events and offers. We’re used to seeing pop-ups like this but they’re usually easy to shut down. Not this one, there’s no ‘No thanks’ option; so the only way you can close it is by clicking on ‘Already subscribed’. In my mind their desire to capture visitor data - before you can even enter the site - shows they’ve put the business before the customer needs. They forgot to stand in the customer shoes when building the site.

So if you're looking for inspiration, if you're looking for dos and dont's, try crossing borders: if your client is in tech, look for ideas in retail; if your client is an online consumer brand, try your local independent coffee shop. You never know what you might find.

Ever had one of those days when every billboard or shop sign seems to be telling you something? To quit your job or to take a leap of courage?

I had one of those days yesterday. But only because I made a decision to tune into my surroundings - I was on my second Street Wisdom, a walking-workshop that uses the urban environment around us to help guide decisions (you can read my blog post of my first experience here).

Street Wisdom is a three hour event: in the first hour participants get tuned in to notice our surroundings; in the second hour we go off by ourselves to walk around and ask a question of the street (a career or business dilemma we may be struggling with); the third hour we come back and share our experiences with the group.

One of the benefits of Street Wisdom is that you can utilise ‘in-between time’, perhaps using a walk in between the office and the park to solve a problem or come up with an idea. You don’t need a large amount of time. Of course most of us are too focused on listening to music, looking down at our ‘phones or just rushing from A-to-B to pay attention to what’s around us; Street Wisdom encourages us to slow down and look around.

The objective is to get inspiration from everything around us - it’s not just about looking at signs - it might be finding a park bench, looking at an unfamiliar view. taking a random left turn or talking to a stranger that yields the results.

That said, I was fascinated by how many of us found clarity just by looking at physical signs, from shop facades to ads on the sides of buses. One member of my group identified the focus for her new business by looking at a shop front; another found that a shop sign - ‘Start’ - gave her encouragement to move forward with her business idea. I had a similar experience when I stumbled into a coffee-shop called ‘Paper & Cup’, I liked how the shop combined two of my passions (coffee and books); it encouraged me to continue blending different disciplines in my work life, a theme that was echoed by a van that said ‘Odds & Ends’. Then walking down a road towards Redchurch Street I saw a series of signs that spoke to me about the need for collaboration: a sign for a community centre, a van saying ‘Alliance’.

And then as my hour was up, I saw this notice on a Redchurch Street lamp post. ‘Please check signs,’ it said.

So perhaps all our answers are out there, we just need to look around us.

Ian talks to James Victore about 'Take This Job & Love It'

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The ‘self-help’ industry is the usual source of inspiration for any burned-out executive looking to reclaim control of their career or take the leap into entrepreneurship and start their own business. But a self-proclaimed American ‘firestarter’ is looking to shake up the world of self-help with his own brand of professional inspiration. Having earned an international reputation as a graphic designer and artist, with his work in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn based James Victore helps people in all walks of life get inspired, get creative and fall back in love with their day job. James is the antithesis of the traditional, self-indulgent, self-help genre. Having run a one day workshop-cum-career-revolution about ‘work, life and bucking the status quo’ in New York, earlier this month James brought ‘Take this job and love it’ to London for the first time. You can read my review of the event here; above you can hear a five minute radio interview I did with James.

But there’s a story behind that story; a multi-layered tale that lies behind that single photograph and those 750 words. A tale of serendipity and grabbing chances.

It all started a few years back when Matt Stillman followed me on Twitter; I think he’d read one of my books. Then one day last February I was standing on the platform at York railway station, when I tweeted:

Matt tweeted back, ‘if you have a spare moment in NYC I would love to say hello’. I had a busy schedule and wasn’t sure I could squeeze him in, but I decided to follow my curiosity and we agreed to meet up. Over coffee at Stumptown I discovered Matt’s interesting story, that every Friday he sits at a folding table in Union Square with a sign that says ‘Creative approaches to what you've been thinking about’, offering help to strangers (here’s a little video I shot with Matt on the street outside Stumptown).

So meeting Matt was a ‘stumble upon’, it wasn’t the result of some great journalistic strategy for finding interesting people, it came from a random tweet. Eighteen months later I pitched Matt’s story to my editor at the Financial Times. She liked it and asked me to write it up for ‘First Person’.

This isn’t some remarkable revelation, this is how life happens. My life is full of such stories: how I met my wife online on the final day of an internet dating trial; how just happening to see the musician Dave Stewart on a street in Soho led to a book deal (you can read about that here); how not getting served in a bar in Barcelona led me to talk to a woman who gave me the idea for another article.

As a storyteller I revel in these stumbled-upon experiences, because that’s where the real nuggets lie.

Last Friday morning I walked through a nondescript door at the eastern end of Oxford Street and into a space that had seen better days: a stained carpet, peeling paintwork and broken ceiling tiles. But actually, the quality of this pop-up event space didn’t matter, because Friday morning was definitely ‘about the coffee, not the cup’.

I first met James in 2012 at The Do Lectures, when we shared a car ride from Wales to Heathrow. James is well known as a graphic designer and artist, whose work has been exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Now, a self-proclaimed ‘firestarter’, he speaks on stages around the world, promising audiences to light a fire - ‘not only in your heart, but also under your ass’.

So James was not in London to talk about his art; he was here to help rethink our relationship with that four letter word: w o r k. Of course I’ve dabbled in this area myself, my books ‘Leap!’, ‘Juggle!’ and ‘Mash-Up!’ are all about looking at our work lives differently. Today there are even more books and courses promising to reinvent our work lives. So what makes James’ perspective different? He’s not a career coach, he’s not an executive who’s taken the leap to become a freelance consultant; he’s an artist. In that sense, I see James as an outsider.

I love outsiders (after all I’m an outsider too; that’s what I do as a consultant and writer). James brings lessons from his Williamsburg design studio to help people get back on track with their career, and not just creatives. In last Friday’s workshop James told stories, got us doing tasks, and even had us dancing and singing. James told the story of how people had ‘should-ed’ on him when he was growing up - ‘you should do this’, ‘you should do that’ - he explained how he had ignored them, and that it was good for you to do the same. Because only you know what’s right for you.

One tenet of his work that resonated with me was the need to bring ‘you’ into your work, advising that the best starting point for a project is to ask ‘what’s interesting for me?’; to bring your passions into your work.

He asked us to challenge the status quo via a slide that proclaimed ‘Life is a cliche’. How the perceived order of things is that familiar, linear path: go to college, get a job, get married, buy a house, get kids, buy a bigger house, retire… and then ‘really live’.

Why? Why wait until you retire to do the things that really stimulate you, why wait to be the real you? Why not put you in your work earlier?

James suggested that to do a 9-5 job and to tow the line is actually the easiest thing in the world, but to have the balls to put yourself into your work, to know who you really are is much harder.

Having put a rocket under my own career fourteen years ago to carve out a work life based on being Me, I know he’s right.

After four years away, I’ve decided to return to Austin, Texas next year for South By South WestInteractive. I’ve put together a panel idea on a favourite subject of mine: cultural differences in doing business between UK/Ireland and the USA. Because we all use the same words, there’s often the assumption we speak the same language. But it’s not that simple in business; whether it’s pitching, hiring, selling or networking, there’s many cultural nuances that if overlooked could jeopardise relationships. Having covered this subject for the Financial Times, British Airways Business Life magazine and The Sunday Independent (Ireland), I’m assembling a panel from both sides of the Atlantic featuring:

First, they didn’t get my self-deprecating sense of humour on the conference call; the next week on their visit to London they didn't understand why I ordered wine at lunch.

That was twenty years ago: it was my first experience of handling transatlantic business relationships, managing a joint venture with ABC Radio Networks, USA. As I got to grips with everything from conference call etiquette to what style of memo worked best, I soon learned the dos and don’ts (like not ordering in wine for an internal networking lunch).

My career has seen plenty of transatlantic relationships since: working for US clients, writing for US audiences, visiting the US. And more recently, in my two years writing for the Financial Times management pages, the majority of people I interviewed were based in the US.

What I’ve learned is that while the UK and US use the same words, we don’t speak the same business language. Whether it’s pitching, hiring, networking or just everyday office culture, there are many cultural nuances that if overlooked could jeopardise relationships.

This has become a favourite subject of mine. Last year I accompanied a UK Trade & Investment-backed digital mission from London to New York and wrote about my experiences in The FT, ‘How To Bridge A Cultural Ocean’ (you may need to register to view). Last month I followed that up from an Irish perspective with a series of articles in the Sunday Independent, hearing from Irish expats in the US. My latest piece is in this month’s British Airways Business Life magazine where I spoke to five Brits working in the USA: the musician and creative entrepreneur Dave Stewart (Los Angeles); entrepreneur Hermione Way (San Francisco); co-owner of Rough Trade record shop Stephen Godfroy (New York); startup co-founder Richard Newton (Austin, Texas); and chairman of Walt Disney International, Andy Bird, CBE (Los Angeles).

If you’re not in a British Airways cabin between now and the end of August, you can read about their experiences and advice online here.

Twelve months ago I co-founded a meetup group in my local neighbourhood; yesterday, when I stepped into my co-founder’s shoes to facilitate the latest meeting, I decided to shake things up a bit.

Rather than meet in our regular coffee shop, we headed for the beach where I led an alfresco workshop on the benefits of changing your working scenery.

Most of us know that if we stay in the same working environment too long, we’ll become stale. Our productivity will suffer and our creativity will plummet. But still, so many organisations continue to build cultures around board rooms and offices. I think we need to challenge the automatic belief that offices are always the best places to work. I explained to the group how in my fourteen years as an independent, I’d never had a single fixed office, preferring to work from a mix of spaces instead. As a collaborator of mine once put it: “You *are* your office”.

Earlier this week on another hot summer’s day, I was pleased to see some workers had taken their meetings outside; in the glorious surroundings of London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall Roof Gardens, a group of executives in summer dresses and rolled up shirtsleeves huddled around a table amongst the plants and flowers. Perhaps we should stop seeing alfresco meetings as a nice treat, and instead see them as a potentially better way of conducting business, where attendees are fired up by their surroundings, rather than sit yawning in an identikit bland meeting room?

At yesterday’s meetup I explained how Nilofer Merchant had championed the ‘walking meeting’, getting exercise at the same time as a fresh perspective from the constant change in scenery. I introduced the group to Street Wisdom, the brainchild of David Pearl and Chris Baréz-Brown that shows us how we can use our surroundings to help guide decision-making; how the environment around us is full of wisdom that we tend to be too busy to notice. Having experienced my first Street Wisdom earlier in the year (read my post on that here), I tried a couple of exercises with the meetup group.

Having warmed everyone up with an exercise to get them noticing their surroundings I then got them asking the street (or in yesterday’s case, the beach and promenade) to help them navigate a career or work decision.

As the twenty members of the group came back from their ten minute walk, it was fascinating to hear how tuning into their surroundings had brought them clarity or a new direction. One guy explained how that seeing channels of water in the mud reminded him how he could pursue multiple options in his career, and how if it failed ‘the tide would come in again’. Another member of the group said how a ‘Keep off this structure’ sign on a jetty had reminded him how much he struggled being told what to do, and how we was more productive without having any rules.

As the morning progressed, the beach filled with groups of school children on a day out to the beach. Whilst the noisy, excited kids were at first a distraction to our meetup, we soon noticed how the kids were having fun on the sand without a care in the world. This was a reminder to many of us to reframe our working lives, to make sure we make time for childlike curiosity and having fun.

What we all learned in two hours is that taking meetings outside is more than just having a pretty-picture backdrop to conversations, it’s using our surroundings to inspire us to be more creative than we could possibly be inside meeting rooms and offices. Most of the group (hopefully) came away inspired and invigorated.

So let’s stop looking at meetings-out-of-the-office as indulgences that are counter to our business culture; and instead recognise the business, human and cultural benefits that come from working and meeting in weird and wonderful spaces.

[I’ll be hosting a free Street Wisdom in Southend-on-Sea in September; in the meantime if you’re interested in having me host an al fresco workshop to get your business inspired about the benefits of changing your scenery, get in touch hello(at) iansanders(dot) com].

It was an apt location for a discussion about innovation: last Tuesday evening I was at Wayra London for the latest in a series of events organised by the innovation consultancy The Foundation. The venue they’d chosen - Wayra - is the business incubator run by Telefonica that provides financial, managerial and technological support to digital startups. But we weren’t there to talk about startup innovation; innovation within larger organisations was on the agenda.

Of course we know it’s easier for innovation to thrive in smaller companies who are more agile and better at taking risks than large organisations. It’s that much-cited speedboat VS supertanker juxtaposition. Last Tuesday The Foundation assembled a panel at Wayra to discuss the challenge for those ‘supertankers’ [The panel line-up was: Natalie Ceeney, responsible for improving HSBC’s customer service and complaint handling; Dan Salmons managing director of PayPoint Mobile, previously director of global innovation at Barclaycard; and Mark Stansfeld, chairman of Giffgaff, a consumer led mobile operator, previously sales director at O2].

The panel agreed it’s hard for big organisations to balance short term health of the business with innovating whatever’s coming next. They recalled their experiences where innovation often gets stifled by boards, by business plans, by road maps that don’t allow for random left turns.

From the discussion I’ve cherry-picked three factors to consider when encouraging innovation in larger organisations:

Avoid the tyranny of finance. Mark argued that in order to thrive, innovation needs to be liberated from a finance-led culture of forecasts and KPIs. His advice was to grant autonomy to teams tasked with innovating new products and services, to free them from a business-planning culture.

Think about innovation when you’re failing. The best time to look at innovation may not be when a business is succeeding, but when it’s failing. Natalie reminded us that First Direct - which has been a huge success in disrupting consumer banking - was launched by Midland Bank when the bank was failing.

Don't ask the customer what they want. In the Q&A it was asked whether validation by focus groups and customer research is important before taking a new product to market. The consensus said not to rely on customer research. Natalie told the story of AT&T conducting customer research before the introduction of mobile telephony. They asked customers if they were interested in owning a mobile phone. Since the customers didn’t understood the benefits of having one (after all, they’d never seen or heard of one) they said no. Those results meant AT&T didn’t move forward in what proved to be a lucrative sector.

In my own work as a writer/thinker, I’ve encouraged grassroots entrepreneurs to ‘unplan’ their business ideas to make them happen, rather than get paralysed by long-term planning. You might think large organisations aren’t brave enough to embrace such radical thinking. So I was pleasantly surprised by the views of a panel who’ve spent their careers in big business, I was encouraged by their advice to ditch the business plan when it comes to developing new products and services.

Towards the end of the discussion someone voiced the view, ‘straight lines and order are overrated’; i.e. it doesn’t matter if you don’t take a linear path to making innovation happen, it doesn’t matter if you took a circuitous and unconventional route. If you have ‘spaghetti lines’ behind you, that’s okay. All that matters is that you took your innovation to market and that you made it happen.

Over the last twenty years I must have visited a few hundred ‘places of work’: co-working spaces, big corporation HQs, small business offices, artist studios, factories, and other workplaces of all shapes and sizes.

But inevitably, most of the places I visit don’t actually make anything on site anymore, having outsourced production overseas; and whilst I’ve been impressed by the number of tech and digital businesses I’ve seen - if they make anything at all - they make things at a screen. Nothing wrong with that, but there’s nothing to touch and feel.

So no wonder I got such a buzz visiting sugru’s HQ last week. Here - in an unassuming building in a mixed street of houses and workshops in south Hackney - they actually make stuff!

Over 500,000 people in 155 countries use sugru - a brightly-coloured self-setting rubber for fixing, modifying and making ‘stuff’. The invention of Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, sugru was born out of an idea she had whilst a student at The Royal College Of Art.

I noticed a tangible buzz as Jane showed me around the office/factory. There’s noise. Machinery. Hums and buzzes. There's a loading bay. Boxes being secured with packing tape. A room where they mix the ingredients. A lab staffed by a woman in white coat and goggles, a (miniscule) production line. With its small scale and bright colours, it looked like a toy factory scene, like something made by Playmobil.

And behind all this buzz and industry is an entrepreneur with her feet firmly on the ground, and a dog under her desk. Jane says that growing up on a farm in rural Ireland helped shape her idea, one that encourages a new generation of consumers to embrace repairing items instead of throwing them away. She told me: “Like a lot of people from rural areas and farms in particular, I grew up in a family where home-made was the preferred option for a lot of things. One of my Granny’s favourite things to do was to mend our clothes on a Sunday, and I loved watching her work”.

Why should you be interested in sugru’s story? Because it's doing things differently and they’re a great success. On the bus-ride from sugru back to Soho, I scribbled down five things that make the business distinctive:

It’s a unique product. Try and describe sugru and it’s hard to do so; that’s the business’s marketing challenge - and opportunity. It’s a brand new invention.

Its customers are its sales force. We often hear how a business’s customers can ‘help do the heavy lifting’, by helping selling the product. So how do you sell the benefits of a product that has infinite applications? You get your customers to share examples, via video and photos, of how they’ve used the product. Thereby inspiring new customers to buy the stuff!

sugru stands for something. I’m a great advocate for businesses competing on their values and thinking as much as their products. sugru is smart because Jane has built a business based on a philosophy that it's better to fix things rather than throw them away. That purpose unites all the customers and makes them proud to use sugru, and to become advocates for the brand. People that use it are passionate about it.

They have their own factory. As I’ve already noted, here is a business in London that makes stuff and sends it to customers around the world. That’s not just a novelty, it has advantages, I love how the factory is next to the office. They could have split the operation across two sites or even outsourced production. But no, there’s just one door between them. The proximity of the founder of the business to functions like production and research is impressive. That gives them an operational and management advantage, being so close to where it’s made.

They’re good at mixing offline with online. They built the business online, but they’re now reaching out to customers and markets offline. For instance, you can now buy sugru in the UK retailer B&Q, and they're expanding into other retailers worldwide.

When we hear about start-up success stories, tech and digital businesses tend to dominate the attention, with the emphasis on shiny apps and digital tools. So it’s refreshing to see a business that makes something you can not only touch and feel, but also mould into infinite applications.

If you still prefer reading newspapers over digital editions or you're the kind of person who prints out online articles to read them off the screen, you may be interested in PaperLater, a new product from Newspaper Club.

With PaperLater you can save web pages to print, it’s a bit like the ‘read it later’ service Instapaperbut delivered to your doormat in a newspaper. I just had my first issue delivered: a mix of ‘long-read’ blog posts and articles I decided I’d rather read off screen.

I’m finding it interesting how the articles I selected for PaperLater change impact by going off screen. I still would have read them on a digital device, but probably would not have lingered over them for so long, just one of tens of articles I consume on screen every day. But when you get an article printed in a newspaper format, it gives it a higher sense of importance. I’m valuing that content more.

It's a smart service (one that starts at £4.99 a copy), but of course it does beg the question about copyright and the intellectual property of the original writer/ publisher. All PaperLater needs to make it better is a mechanism where the publisher, writer or content creator can benefit financially from having their work printed out. Perhaps we’ll see the PaperLater team white-label their service to online publishers and sites who will offer these service to readers, and share in the revenue?

Tom Watson

"Only a reckless fool would rebel against his government on the second day of a general election. I should know, I did. And Ian Sanders helped me achieve this notoriety. An opening paragraph in his book hit me like a slap around the face. So thanks Ian. You helped me rediscover the inner rebel and life is good."